Using Wacom Touch Gestures in Unsupported Applications

I’ve recently made the decision to learn some drawing skills. Specifically,
I wanted to start with a tablet right away so I could avoid having to
re-teach myself to using a tablet instead of paper. However, I still
consider it important to be able to shift and rotate the canvas with my
hand, so I went for a Wacom tablet with touch.

Most artists I knew swear by Paint Tool SAI, but that just happens to be
one of the applications not fully supported by Wacom’s drivers (pressure
works fine, but touch is a no-go). Luckily, Wacom’s drivers are pretty
flexible and you can easily modify them to support your favorite application.

If you’re not a power user, you might want to scroll to
Wacom Driver Settings for a moment
before starting to see if you feel up to it, since it requires some
Control Panel operations and XML editing.

Paint Tool SAI

For the rotation gesture to work in Paint Tool SAI, we need to set up
some keyboard shortcuts than can then be simulated by the Wacom driver.

1. Open the Keyboard Shortcuts window in Paint Tool SAI

2. Set up Alt+F13 to rotate the view clockwise and Alt+F14 counter-clickwise

First, tick the "Alt" check box at the upper left, then locate
the entries for F13 and F14 on the left and assign "Rotate View 90°
Clockwise" and "Rotate View 90° Counter-Clockwise" to them
(they may be named differently and the "90°" are just a translation
error). Make sure you pick "Rotate View", not "Rotate
Canvas" on the right!

3. Edit the Wacom driver’s touch emulation settings

Scroll down to the Wacom Driver Settings
section or continue with the next section if you want to set up Manga Studio
as well.

Manga Studio Ex 5

Manga Studio uses the mouse wheel for zooming and has no keyboard shortcuts
for panning and rotating by default, so we need to change a few things here:

1. Change the modifier keys to enable panning with the mouse wheel

You can find these settings under the "File" menu:

Set the mouse wheel’s normal action to "Scroll vertically" by clicking
the combo box in the middle and picking "View operation". Then set
Ctrl+mouse wheel to "Zoom in by up and zoom out by down" as well as
Alt+mouse wheel to "Scroll horizontally":

2. Set up keyboard shortcuts for canvas rotation

You’ll find the keyboard shortcuts window in the menu right above the modifier
key settings from the previous step!

We can only select keys that you can press here, so I picked Alt+F12 for
"Rotate left" as well as Alt+F11 for "Rotate right":

3. Choose finer rotation steps for the keys

Normally Manga Studio rotates by 15 degrees per press of the rotation key.
That’s a bit rough, so we’ll change it to 10 degrees (we could go even lower,
but then manga studio wouldn’t be able to catch up with the two-finger
rotation gesture and the canvas would take several seconds to reach its
final rotation even after you lifted your hand).

Open the "Preferences" window, which again is right above
the "Shortcut Settings" from the previous step. Then select
"Canvas" to the left and enter the value 10 in the text box
labelled "Step" in "Angle":

This is where it gets a bit tricky. Follow the steps exactly to avoid
messing up your Wacom driver and requiring a reinstall!

1. Open your Services window in your Control Panel

I believe the easiest way to get there is pressing Win+Break (that’s
the weird key you never use, right above Page Up :P), then clicking on
"Control Panel Home" in the upper left. Then in the Control
Panel, just enter "services" into the search box at
upper right and you should be presented with the option to
"View local services":

2. Stop your Wacom service

Just search for "Wacom" in the list (you can click in the list
and type "wa" to jump to it), then click on
"Stop the service" or use the stop button in the toolbar:

Keep the services manager window open, we’ll need it again in a moment!

3. Open a Notepad window with administrator privileges

Here’s the quickest way to get one: Press Win+R and enter "Notepad"
in the window that pops up:

When you press enter, Notepad (a bare-bones text editor) should open.
On Windows XP we would be done by now, but on Windows Vista, 7 or 8,
this Notepad window doesn’t have administrator privileges. Here’s how
to grant them temporarily:

Find the Notepad window in your task bar:

Now hold the Ctrl and Shift keys pressed and click on it. You should
get the well-known prompt asking whether you want to allow Notepad to
make changes to this computer. Say yes.

Now a second Notepad window will have opened right on top of the first
one. This second window has administrator privileges. Close the first
window below it (be careful not to get confused about which is which :)).

4. Edit AppGestures.xml

All that’s left to do is to open your AppGestures.xml file.
Click "File" -> "Open", then in the file selector
window, go to C:\Program Files\Wacom\Tablet (depending on your
Wacom product, instead of Tablet the final folder could be called
Pen or something).

Because AppGestures.xml does not end in .txt, you’ll have
to change your view to show "All Files (*.*)" in the lower right
to see it.

Once you’ve opened your AppGestures.xml, scroll down a bit
(maybe until you see <displayname>Adobe Photoshop</displayment>).
As you can see, the file contains blocks of information, always starting
with the opener <ArrayElement> and ending with a matching
</ArrayElement>.

Insert the following two blocks inbetween the others (I inserted mine in front
of Photoshop, but any place after the first 3 entries is good):

It should fit in neatly with the other blocks in the file. Make sure
the block you pasted is not inside another <ArrayElement>
block or something.

Check twice that the new block correctly lines up with the others,
then save and close your AppGestures.xml.

5. Start the Wacom service again

Switch back to the services manager window you kept open in step 2
and start the Wacom service again by clicking on
"Start the service" or using the play button
in the toolbar.

Done

Congratulations, if you open up Paint Tool SAI or Manga Studio now,
you should be able to pinch-zoom, two-finger rotate and pan the canvas,
all via touch and without moving your hands away from the drawing area!

Hello. I have been looking for something like this since I bought my Windows 8 tablet one year ago;but this only works with Wacom branded devices (cintiqs, intuos, bamboos etc) isn’t it?

I tested it on my Asus Vivotab tf810c tabletpc with Wacom penabled tech following all your steps I can’t make it to work. When I try to pinch and drag, the cursor changes to the cross of the move tool, but nothing happens.

I guess wacom tabletpc tech only works when the pen is in the active zone and when it leaves it the default Windows 8 api takes it’s place…

Anyhow thanks for your great effort, many Wacom users will appreciate this.

It’s a feature of the Wacom driver, so if your Vivotab uses it (i.e. the AppGestures.xml file existed), it should work.

If the cursor changes in your case, maybe the key bindings don’t match up with the ones in the XML code?
Or you might have something running in the background (eg. a VoIP client) which captures some of the keys.
Hard to tell…

Ideally, future versions of Paint Tool and Manga Studio would support the multi-touch and ink features of Windows 7/8, of course 🙂

Thanks for the tutorial. The pinch and zoom works but I can’t get it to rotate in Sai. If you don’t mind my linking to it, Mario Kluser at youtube /watch?v=12VHCIswy2Q has a solution for this. Basically, go into your pen tablet settings and reprogram one of the buttons on the pen to be shift + spacebar. This is sai’s shortcut mode for rotation. You can set it up so that this shortcut only works in Sai and in all other applications the button will behave normally.

O my GOD! This was actually a shot in the dark for me when I tried this method! I mean, I’m using CSP instead of MS5. I tried it and it actually works! Before, If I were going to pan using my two fingers or if I was gonna rotate it in the other side (initially, it only works counter-clockwise), it won’t work. But thanks to this, and a few tweaks on the “manga studio 5” part and changing it to Clip Studio Paint. IT FINALLY WORKS! Thank you so much ^_^

For some reason I can’t get this to work on my Surface Pro 2. The machine runs Windows 8, uses the Wacom Feel Driver, and the appgestures xml file is there (different path, but it’s there c:\program files\tablet\isd), but for some reason I can’t quite get it to work with Sai. Any thoughts?

Hmm, weirdly enough when I do a rotate gesture, Sai’s little button press indicator at the bottom right shows that Ctrl is being used. I copied the text exactly,and even double checked the line about rotation ( ) so I’m not even sure what’s going on. Any insight you can offer would be greatly appreciated!

Just for the record, I just installed Painter 2015 and it reads my wacom instantly even if I did not put the app in my wacom profile yet , Im amazed on how smooth the rotation & zoom is compared to sai

It works really well for Manga Studio / Clip Studio, but I just can”t make it work with SAI no matter what keys I use. It seems like SAi doesn’t recognize it at all (no rotation, no pan, no zoom). I’m pretty sure I did nothing wrong since I managed to make it work on Clip Studio…